Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt

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James Baikie. Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt

CHAPTER I "A LAND OF OLD RENOWN"

CHAPTER II. A DAY IN THEBES

CHAPTER III. A DAY IN THEBES—Continued

CHAPTER IV. PHARAOH AT HOME

CHAPTER V. THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER

CHAPTER VI. CHILD-LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT

CHAPTER VII. SOME FAIRY-TALES OF LONG AGO

CHAPTER VIII. SOME FAIRY-TALES OF LONG AGO (Continued)

CHAPTER IX. EXPLORING THE SOUDAN

CHAPTER X. A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

CHAPTER XI. EGYPTIAN BOOKS

CHAPTER XII. TEMPLES AND TOMBS

CHAPTER XIII. AN EGYPTIAN'S HEAVEN

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SKETCH-MAP OF ANCIENT EGYPT.

But besides that, it is a land which has a most strange and wonderful story of its own. No other country has so long a history of great Kings, and wise men, and brave soldiers; and in no other country can you see anything to compare with the great buildings, some of them most beautiful, all of them most wonderful, of which Egypt has so many. We have some old and interesting buildings in this country, and people go far to see cathedrals and castles that are perhaps five or six hundred years old, or even more; but in Egypt, buildings of that age are looked upon as almost new, and nobody pays very much attention to them. For the great temples and tombs of Egypt were, many of them, hundreds of years old before the story of our Bible, properly speaking, begins.

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An old Greek historian once said, "Egypt is the gift of the Nile," and it is perfectly true. We have seen how the great river made the country to begin with, cutting out the narrow valley through the hills, and building up the flat plain of the Delta. But the Nile has not only made the country; it keeps it alive. You know that Egypt has always been one of the most fertile lands in the world. Almost anything will grow there, and it produces wonderful crops of corn and vegetables, and, nowadays, of cotton. It was the same in old days. When Rome was the capital of the world, she used to get most of the corn to feed her hungry thousands from Egypt by the famous Alexandrian corn-ships; and you remember how, in the Bible story, Joseph's brethren came down from Palestine because, though there was famine there, there was "corn in Egypt." And yet Egypt is a land where rain is almost unknown. Sometimes there will come a heavy thunder-shower; but for month after month, year in and year out, there may be no rain at all.

How can a rainless country grow anything? The secret is the Nile. Every year, when the rains fall in the great lake-basin of Central Africa, from which one branch of the great river comes, and on the Abyssinian hills, where the other branch rises, the Nile comes down in flood. All the lower lands are covered, and a fresh deposit of Nile mud is left upon them; and, though the river does not rise to the higher grounds, the water is led into big canals, and these, again, are divided up into little ones, till it circulates through the whole land, as the blood circulates through your arteries and veins. This keeps the land fertile, and makes up for the lack of rain.

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